We often hear older people say “I was a teenager once too” and I get that. But by no means were you a teen in 2017. By no means do you understand the pressure we’re under. By no means do you understand how technology fastened our lives and took joys away from us. You don’t understand what it feels like to lose your best years to social media. To go out with your friends and not make memories because they are too busy instagramming them, to have pictures of you on the internet without your consent all the time. Documenting your existence through screens that can’t keep you warm.
Steve Jobs forbid his children to use iPhone’s, but saw no damage in selling them to us.
In all honesty, we were robbed of our privacy, we live lives where everyone knows everything. All we listen to on the radio are songs about profanity, the music industry is highly dominated by content-less pop music with the intention of keeping the masses dumb. All they mention are brands we’re too young to afford, and as they shove Kylie Jenner and Miley Cyrus down our throats, we crumble under the need of living the life they do.
We’ve been brainwashed. It is true, we live in a world that’s so heavily sexualized a world where the naked body of a young girl sells everything from perfume to hamburgers, but God forbid she chooses to be sexy under her own agency.
You want to act like it was us who chose this, that we chose to be young, and sad, and confused, and insecure, but what we truly are is the end product of greed, the young are an easy target and parents are weak for their children. Marketers know this. They cater to us.
If you’d start to view the youth with compassion rather than hate because of all “the privilege” we are growing up with that you didn’t . You’d probably realize how badly we are suffering, you’d start viewing us as the victims we are. We own nothing. We are nothing. Everything goes viral and spins around for 15 minutes and after that we have to move on. We live to just be a buzz rather than a legacy. Suicide amongst teens, depression, anxiety are all at an all time high. You still wonder why?
We are a weightless generation. we can’t create things that linger around, because technology has a way of changing every 5 seconds. there’s always something bigger and better coming out. We live for having the latest, for we never get to be known as the greatest anyways. we live for the likes and the hits and the comments. For us, everything is visual and nothing is tangible. Instagram popularity has skyrocketed, and is the most popular amongst young teens.
Why? Because they don’t even have the attention span it takes to read no more so they shift to more visual platforms.
So talk to the young people in your life, give them a chance, showcase interest, don’t be quick to label them entitled and lazy. They are under more pressure than you could ever think of. You question: Where the hell is the youth of nowadays going? Well, probably to the nearest cafe with free wifi.
Poet, inter-sectional feminist, Media and Communications student and creative writer.